Monday 2 August 2010 14.33 EDT
First published on Monday 2 August 2010 14.33 EDT

I can't imagine that anyone greeted the news of Ian Huntley's compensation claim with a great sense of joy. The Soham double murderer is suing the prison service for damages, claiming it failed in its duty of care to protect him from an inmate who attacked him with a razor blade. Public outrage has been predictable, for the prospect of Huntley receiving close to £100,000 of public money is so self-evidently objectionable, every moral instinct tells us it can't possibly be right. These instincts have been given lavish coverage – and you'd have to be very odd not to sympathise with the surviving victim of an earlier sex attack by Huntley, who raged: "The bottom line is, he doesn't deserve a thing." But instinct, by its very nature, is only an impulse – and once followed through to its logical conclusion, the fury against Huntley's lawsuit begins to look a lot less morally sound.

The prison service was always aware of the dangers Huntley would face. Since he was jailed in 2003 he has had sugar in boiling water thrown over him by fellow inmates, narrowly escaped a stabbing, and been severely beaten. Yet even after these attacks, another prisoner was still able to cut Huntley's throat in prison. If the state can't ensure the safety of someone in its full-time custody, you'd have to wonder who it can protect – and if it fails in this most basic duty of care, we'd surely all hope it would be held accountable, which is what Huntley's case seeks to do.

"The state is more zealous about guarding the human rights of criminals," a Daily Express columnist thundered, "than those of the law-abiding public." This is patently untrue. Huntley is in prison because we punish people who violate the rights of the public. Happily, however, we guard the human rights of everyone, not only the "law-abiding" – and for all the hurrumphing about human-rights-gone-mad, few of us would actually wish it to be any other way. We wouldn't for a minute accept a defence from a rapist that his victim was a prostitute, and therefore deserved what she got. In Huntley's case, he was the victim of an attempted murder – and if the prison service didn't take reasonable steps to prevent the crime, then it was demonstrably negligent.

When he was minister of justice, Jack Straw said that if Huntley's claim proved successful, it would be a case of "compensation culture gone absolutely mad". In recent days Colin Moses, of the Prison Officers' Association, has also railed against "compensation culture" – and most of us have felt uneasy at times about the growing role of litigation in civic life. But public unease tends to be inconsistent and wildly subjective; Moses himself contrasted Huntley's possible payout with the "disgraceful levels" paid to injured servicemen, suggesting that they deserve a hefty sum when arguably it was as much their own choice to risk injury on the battlefield as it was Huntley's to wind up in jail.

Similarly, medical negligence claims generally receive a favourable press, and even if the condition the doctors failed to treat properly was brought on by the patient's own behaviour – through obesity, say – it's seldom suggested that the patient had forfeited their right to see a competent doctor. Yet Norman Brennan, founder of the Victims of Crime Trust, said: "Huntley is the one responsible for being in prison. He should shut up."

Either we believe that compensation is the correct way to hold negligent authorities to account, or we don't. But the principle can't possibly depend upon whether we approve of the people getting the money. Nobody disapproves of murderers like Huntley more than other inmates do; prisoners operate under one of the most censorious moral codes on earth, in which armed robbers – like the man who slit Huntley's throat – are heroes, and sex offenders are scum. So it seems very strange that people like Brennan have signed up to the self-serving moral code of prisoners, while claiming to speak for justice.

Brennan wants inmates convicted of heinous crimes to be denied the right to sue – but who is to be the judge of heinous? Others suggest that all convicted prisoners be barred from seeking compensation – which has at least the merit of consistency, but is astonishingly short-sighted, unless we want prison to become a lawless medieval bearpit. As John Cooper QC, the human rights barrister, puts it: "Can you imagine what would happen if the prison service thought, well, we can't be sued?"

However distasteful Huntley's claim, it has to be preferable to the alternatives. There were more than 15,000 assaults by inmates last year, an increase of more than 50% in the past decade. If compensation is the means by which the state is incentivised to uphold law and order, then £100,000 would be a small price to pay.

As that notorious bleeding heart softie Winston Churchill said, 100 years ago: "You can measure the civilisation of a society by how it treats its prisoners." We don't have corporal or capital punishment in this country. The state doesn't flog people, or stone them to death, and we regard as barbaric those countries that do. If the state isn't allowed to punish offenders by attacking them with razor blades and boiling sugar water, it shouldn't be allowed to contract out the job to criminals, and let them do the dirty work on its behalf.